And the Petals Wither
by Orchidaceous
Summary: A first person excursion childhood to death from the point of view of Fëanor, exploring his descent into insanity and cruelty.


Marginalia? For all intents and purposes, this is overly poetic discourse. I have absolutely no desire to simulate Tolkien's writing style. I'm not Tolkien, so why pretend? I'm more interested in toying with character development than syntactical patterns, anyway. :)

************************

I wondered what my mother would think of the gangly boy sprawled out on her floor, long limbs arranged like discarded flowers, breathing in her words like air.

Laurelin's glow bathed the room in a dim, lazy sepia. Dust particles cascaded through the light in an amaranthine promenade. On a corner table, needles and colorful threads formed a haphazard mosaic.

They called her Serindë. Her embroidery was beautiful, but was far transcended in beauty by her words. She spun phrases as sweet as forbidden wine. Her poetry was a welcome, painful intoxication.

I wanted to hate her; I wanted Ata to hate her. She left us. She had left an abyss in our hearts that we could topple into if we took a wrong turn or stepped too far. But I could only love her. Love? No. I was obsessed with the very idea of her.

Scarlet blooms had vined their way through her agile fingers like a winding, cataclysmic spiderweb. In Lórien, they thrived, while my mother had lain dying in their careless embrace. 

I didn't know what that bloom was called, and I didn't need to. Effortlessly, I could fashion a name for it myself, and it would be the password of admission into a one member brotherhood, the gate to an untraveled path, the catalyst in a race to the edge of an unreachable horizon.

Carnilótë. Red flower. That was my amil. Her blood must have been made from the crushed petals of that flower. Nothing else would have been sacred enough to flow through her body.

I tried to imagine her wandering in a field of towering, golden grass, wild and uninhibited. Happy. Laughing. Wildflowers dripping from her fingers. Tossed into the air. Raining down on her upturned face and catching in her dark hair. 

But I couldn't. So I shifted and rested my chin on a folded fist, trailing a languid finger over her words. 

_     Crimson folds_

_     tidal as the sea; _

_     Explored like a_

_     whispered secret_

_     Laughter dueling pain_

_     over the broken terrain_

_     and body-dew jeweled on_

_     sloping skin_

_     A shuttered heart_

_     struggling to break_

_     through the louvre_

_     of a guarded fortress_

_     Muted cries_

_     wavering over a_

_     lake of forgotten dreams,_

_     Echoing softly, violent..._

What did that mean? Dizzy, I thought about asking Ata; no, he might be angered that I had dared to disturb the sacredness of her room. Sighing, I traced my finger in the cool dust that veiled the chamber. It clung with a particular obstinacy to a blanket that was draped across a chair with twisting arms and back. Ata had crafted it for her. _I miss you, Ami, I wrote in the dust, wishing she could find it and would smile to know that her passing was mourned._

I felt sick with her memory, the smell of her, her unspoken words. I felt nauseated that she had the gall to tease me with the promise of loving me and being my mother. She lied. Indifferently, she had impaled my hopes on jagged rocks and tossed the mangled corpse at my feet when she became too exhausted to mutilate it any more. She let her fëa drift to the Halls of Mandos and her hroa rot in Lórien's gardens. The Fëanturi had my mother in both spirit and body and I hated them for it.

Coerced by frustration and anger, I shredded her poem. Stanza, line; phrase... word, letter. Comma. Stray ink smear. I tore at it until most of the pieces were too small to be torn any further. Gathering the slivers of paper, I staggered across the room and opened my shaking hands over a crystal vase and released the paper shreds, watching them float through the curving shaft and be engulfed by stagnant water. Fallen petals long since decomposed. Overwhelmed, I slipped out of the room. If Ata knew of my tiptoeing excursions to this maternal temple, he never said anything. 

Outside, I exposed my grief raw and unbridled to the blue, elastic sky.


End file.
